Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

A light always burned in the hall, and gave it tonight a somehow eerie vigilance. Nick locked the door behind them, and put the keys back in his pocket, and this time, after two steps, they had shaken their way down his leg and out on to the chequered marble. Leo, peeking in the hall mirror, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. On the console table were spare car keys, opera glasses, one of Gerald's grey fedoras, a letter "By Hand" addressed to the Rt Hon Mr and the Hon Mrs Gerald Fedden-and together, as a careless still life, reflected in the mirror, they seemed to Nick both wonderful and embarrassing. He stood still for a moment and listened. The light, from a brass lantern hanging in the well of the stair, threw steep shadows down inside the threshold of the dining room, revealing only the black satin bodice of a nineteenth-century Kessler. The Hon and the Rt Hon were both in Barwick for the night on constituency business, and whilst he confirmed this to himself he was also rewording the sentence in which he would explain Leo to them if, after all, they came chattering in. He had a sense of their possessing the house and everything in it, calmly but defiantly, and of its stone staircase and climbing cornices reaching rather pitilessly up into the shadows. He gave Leo a passing kiss on the cheek, and drew him into the kitchen, where the under-unit lighting stammered and blinked into life. "Do you want a whisky?"

And for once Leo said, "I don't mind if I do! Yeah, that would be nice. Thanks very much, Nick." He strolled round the room as if not really noticing it, and stood scanning the wall of photographs. One of the Tatler pictures from Toby's twenty-first had now been bought, blown up and framed: a wildly smiling family group in which the Home Secretary seemed to show some awareness of being an intruder. Just above them the student Gerald, in tails, was shaking hands with Harold Macmillan at the Oxford Union. Again Leo made no comment, but when Nick handed him the cold tumbler he saw in his eyes and in his very faint smile that he was noting and storing. Perhaps he was calculating the degree of affront represented by all this Toryness and money. Nick felt his own kudos as family friend, as keyholder, was a very uncertain quantity. "Let's go upstairs," he said.

He went up two at a time, in too much of a hurry, and when he looked back on the turn he saw Leo dawdling by the same factor that he was rushing; he went into the drawing room and pressed switches that brought on lamps on side tables and over pictures-so that when Leo sauntered in he saw the room as Nick had first seen it two years before, all shadows and reflections and the gleam of gilt. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, longing for it to be a triumph, but taking his cue from the suppressed curiosity in Leo's face.

"I'm not used to this," Leo said.

"Oh…"

"I don't drink whisky."

"Ah, no, well -"

"Who knows what it'll do to me? I might get dangerous."

Nick grinned tightly and said, "Is that a threat or a promise?" He reached out and touched Leo's hip-his hand lay there for a second or two. Normally, together, alone, they would have been snogging, holding each other very tightly; though sometimes, it was true, Leo laughed at Nick's urgency and said, "Don't panic, babe! I'm not going anywhere! You've got me!" Leo rested his glass on the mantelpiece, and eyed Guardi's Capriccio with S. Giorgio Maggiore, which certainly seemed a rather pointless picture after The Shadow of Death. It was hard to imagine Rachel haranguing her guests about the clever something in it. Underneath it the invitations were propped, overlapping, making almost one long curlicued social sentence, Mr and Mrs Geoffrey- & Countess of Hexham-Lady Carbury "At Home" for-Michael and Jean-The Secretary of State… and those others, amazingly thick, with chamfered edges, The Lord Chamberlain is Commanded by Her Majesty to Request… which tended to stay there long after the events they referred to, and which gave Nick as well a lingering pompous thrill. Though he saw now, very quickly, that such a pleasure required willing complicity in Gerald's habit of showing off to himself. He turned away, pretending the invitations weren't there, and Leo said, with a derisive tut,

"God, the snobs."

Nick laughed. "They're not really snobs," he said. "Well, he is perhaps a bit. They're…"It was hard to explain, hard to know, in the dense compact of the marriage, who sanctioned what. They were each other's alibi. And Nick saw that Leo was using the word in a looser way, to mean rich people, who lived in nice places, to mean nobs. It struck him that he might be about to take the whole treat of coming to Kensington Park Gardens and making love in a bed as an elaborate but crushing rebuff. He watched him sip some more, deliberately, and then wander towards the front windows. He tried to act on his advice of fifteen minutes earlier, tried to trust his Uncle Leo. The room was devised and laid out for entertaining, on a generous scale, and for a second, as if a thick door had opened, he heard the roar of accumulated talk and laughter, the consensual social roar, instead of the clock's ticking and the fizz of silence.

"That's a nice bit of oyster," Leo said, pointing at a walnut commode. "And that's Sevres, if I'm not wrong, with that blue."

"Yes, I think it is," Nick said, feeling that this nod at a common interest also brought old Pete rather critically into the room. Old Pete would have had some smart gay backchat to deal with an awkward moment like this.

"No, they've got some nice pieces," Leo said, flatly, and a little ponderously, and so perhaps shyly. He turned round, nodding. "You've done well."

"Darling, none of it's mine…"

"I know, I know." Leo sat down at the piano, and after a moment's thought stood his glass on a book on the lid. "What's this, then… Mozart, all right, that's not too bad," checking the cover of the music on the stand, but letting it fall back to the eternally open Andante. "So what key's this in?"-as if the key required some special tactics, like a golf-shot. "F major…"

"It's a funny old piano," said Nick. He felt that if Leo played the piano, especially if he played it badly, it would waken the unconscious demons of the house and bring them in yawning and protesting.

"Ah, that's all right," Leo murmured courteously; and he started to play, with a distracted frown at the page. It was the great second movement of K533, spare, probing, Bach-like, that Nick had discovered, and tried to play, on the night when he'd lost his chance of meeting Leo-till Catherine had complained, and he'd apologized and doodled off into Waldorf music. To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, "vulgar and unsafe"-that was the worst thing. And the music seemed to know this, to know the irresistible curve of hope, and its hollow inversion. Leo played it pretty steadily, and Nick stood behind him, willing it along, nudging it through those quickly corrected wrong notes and tense hesitations that are a torture of sight-reading and yet heighten the rewards when everything runs clear and good. When Leo suddenly went steeply wrong he gave a disparaging shout, struck a few random chords, then reached for his glass. "Must be too pissed to play," he said, not necessarily joking.

Nick sniggered. "You're good. I can't play that. I didn't know you could play." He felt very touched, and chastened, as if by a glimpse of his own unquestioned assumptions. It opened a new perspective, the sight of Leo in his jeans and sweatshirt and baseball boots raising Mozart out of the sonorous old Bosendorfer. And it seemed to have loosened him up, he was like a shy guest who makes a brilliant joke, its lustre heightened by delay and distillation, and who suddenly finds he's enjoying himself. Nick grabbed him from behind and squashed a kiss onto his cheek.